Preliminary question:
Does VirtueMart Google Checkout support non-google checkout payment methods, such as regular paypal? Your demo site shows it does, I am just puzzled by 'google checkout' text in the title of the product.

Assumption:
I purchase and install both the Membership control and VirtueMart. We will use only Paypal method as a method of payment. Joomla 1.5 is installed without any other major components/plugins.

Website and membership layout:
Non-registered visitors - have access to specific sections and / or categories within the joomla site.
Registered members - free - have access to a next layer of sections and / or categories plus the above.
Paid members Subscription A - have access to the above plus sections / categories that belong to A subscription.
Paid members Subscription B - have access to the first two layers above + sections / categories that belong to B subscription - no access to subscription A.
C, D subscriptions possible.

A member can purchase a subscription to A and have an access to it, and then later on decided to subscribe to subscription B. At that point he should belong to both and should have an access to both.

An easy to understand example would be, say a website with 'cooking recipe content'. You'd have several sections such as Asian cooking, Italian cooking, Greek cooking, etc. each having bunch of articles in its own section.

If someone is non-registered member he can see e.g. American cooking only. If he registers for free, he can access American + Greek. Then he has to pay and subscribe to Asian cooking to see it. He can also pay and subscribe to Italian to see it, or both and he should be able to see both Asian and Italian as well. He may belong to both subscriptions if he pays for both of them. Makes sense?

Can I achieve something like this with your software? If not, is there a way to maybe lay out the subscriptions in other way that would meet the objective or at least get close enough?

Besides digital content subscriptions I would also like to offer physical goods, like e.g. asian cooking book, italian cooking book.

Can I use VirtueMart to sell physical goods along with subscriptions as well? If not, that's ok, as far as I can use another third-party plug-in to do it that would not interfere with VirtueMart.

Thank you for your answers.

Rudy

Hi Rudy,

Thanks for your great questions! Here are my comments:

Does VirtueMart Google Checkout support non-google checkout payment methods, such as regular paypal? Your demo site shows it does, I am just puzzled by 'google checkout' text in the title of the product.

Google Checkout is an add-on payment module. If you use VM, you can use so many different payment methods including Paypal, 2Checkout etc. We create the Google Checkout payment module because we (I mean our website) needed an additional payment method, in case some customers cannot get through the Paypal payment method. Therefore if you use the Google Checkout, you still can use other payment methods like Paypal and 2Checkout. The difference is that Google Checkout charges slightly lower rate at this stage, but it will increase the commission rate to 3.4% from May 2009.

After we created Google Checkout for our website, we decided to release it as an extension product as well.

One note: the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) for Google Checkout is still in beta testing stage, which means that you still need to manually activate the order at this moment. We will release the stable version that support IPN later.

Website and membership layout:
Non-registered visitors - have access to specific sections and / or categories within the joomla site.
Registered members - free - have access to a next layer of sections and / or categories plus the above.
Paid members Subscription A - have access to the above plus sections / categories that belong to A subscription.
Paid members Subscription B - have access to the first two layers above + sections / categories that belong to B subscription - no access to subscription A.
C, D subscriptions possible.

A member can purchase a subscription to A and have an access to it, and then later on decided to subscribe to subscription B. At that point he should belong to both and should have an access to both.

An easy to understand example would be, say a website with 'cooking recipe content'. You'd have several sections such as Asian cooking, Italian cooking, Greek cooking, etc. each having bunch of articles in its own section.

If someone is non-registered member he can see e.g. American cooking only. If he registers for free, he can access American + Greek. Then he has to pay and subscribe to Asian cooking to see it. He can also pay and subscribe to Italian to see it, or both and he should be able to see both Asian and Italian as well. He may belong to both subscriptions if he pays for both of them. Makes sense?

This is a very good example of WHAT THE COMPONENT IS DOING! I can confirm that you can surely achieve this by using the membership component. Think of our website,

1. This page is for non-reg users: http://www.opensource-excellence.co.uk/ ... &Itemid=25
2. This page is for Membership Control members: http://www.opensource-excellence.co.uk/ ... &Itemid=31
3. This page is for Anti-Hacker members: http://www.opensource-excellence.co.uk/ ... &Itemid=24

The structure is similar to yours. You can set some sections to viewable by certain groups of members only. If these members want to pay for other membership, say Membership Control Members pay for the Anti-Hacker Membership, besides the Membership Control content, they can see the content for the Anti-Hacker Membership as well. Exactly what you want, right?

Can I use VirtueMart to sell physical goods along with subscriptions as well? If not, that's ok, as far as I can use another third-party plug-in to do it that would not interfere with VirtueMart.

Definitely yes! That's why we pick VM as the payment component to integrate with our component. If you setup the membership to link with the VM product, the users will be allocated to the membership automatically after they pay for it. However, if you don't link the membership with the VM products, VM will treat this as non-membership products (physical or other download-able products).

Hope all these help and look forward to your order soon!

Best wishes,
Helix

Great. Thank you for the fast and clear answers. I am going to give it a try.

Thanks Rudy! Indeed, as I said, your example is very clear and it is a very good example of what the component can do! And I added this link to JED as well. Many thanks for your questions!

VirtueMart (formerly known as mambo-phpShop) is an open source e-commerce solution designed as an extension of the Mambo or Joomla! content management systems (CMS). VirtueMart is written in PHP and requires the MySQL database environment for storage. It is best suited for low to medium level traffic web-sites.also take a look at http://www.opensource-excellence.co.uk/index.php?option=com_virtuemart

i am looking to use joomla to create a private club sales site where users (customers) have to sign up (join) to have access to special product sales. is this possible with this extension?

thanks

Hi,

Is this what you want: http://membership.opensource-excellence ... blog/38/82

This uses Membership Control to restrict the access to VM products to members only.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Helix

By the way, we will release the VM pro addon soon.

Hi,

I am the original writer of this thread. I have purchased this extensions and have to say that it has lived up to what I expected it to do. If you need a membership control on multiple levels or even single level, this is an extension you need.

Now, I need the antihack extension, as the bots and scripts are registering on my website left and right.

Thanks for the excellent work.

Rudy

Thanks Rudy!

If you need any help from us, please contact us in our ticket system, which can be accessed from here:

https://www.opensource-excellence.co.uk/tickets

Best wishes,
Helix